, though Wilhelm recurs to his
illusions, and even embodies them by going upon the stage, the seeds of
discriminating judgment are sown in his heart, and are already
germinating.

Travel, with observation of men, and the attempt to work with them,
sobers him further. He begins to recognize limits and conditions, and to
do so _without_ surrendering his hopes and happy dreams. He perceives,
little by little, that there are some men who can give and receive help,
and some who can do neither,--some with whom one can nobly cooperate,
others whose hands approach his own only to obstruct and entangle. He
sees that he himself is limited, and that possibly the world might not
fare so much better in his hands than in those of its Maker. It dawns
upon him, that, on the whole, he is not here to make worlds, but to work
in a limited sphere and for limited results. And yet his hopes and
imaginations are not put to shame; for he feels, that, even amid these
iron limits of labor and effect, a result of unlimited, _absolute_ worth
is also getting wrought.

And now, in this harmonizing of heat and cold into one tempered economy,
in this recognition of limits and conditions, without surrender of
inspiring imagination and hope, he approaches the term of his
wandering, and nears home.

This consummation is hastened in what may seem a singular way,--by
reading Shakspeare. These matchless pictures of real life give him, as
life itself had never given, the feeling of _real_. The sentiment of
Reality, for the first time, awakens in power. It is much, almost
infinitely much, he perceives, to be just this, real. The smallest
reality--so with some astonishment he discovers--affords more scope to
imagination itself than any conceivable magnificence of make-belief.
Real,--rooted in eternal Nature, with a pedigree older than the stars!
Is not any pebble, if we consider its advent into existence and its
cosmic relations, enough, not only to occupy, but to beggar imagination?
Existence,--is not that the one inexhaustible fact? He feels it so, and
in that feeling the contending opposites of his being come to sudden
reconciliation.

Reality,--the hard, cold, critical understanding has done no worse than
to insist upon that. But it has insisted upon that after its own cold
fashion, as a mere frozen surface, giving no warm and fruitful
hospitality to the divine seeds of hope, love, and imagination. On the
other hand, the angels of Wilhelm's heart have